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Tetris couldn’t have been designed with more serendipity. Not only did creator Alexey Pajitnov put together the most instantly recognisable and enormously popular puzzle game, but he designed it in the shape of a mobile phone. Now that’s foresight. And while the game is currently selling in its millions of squillions for the handheld market, it’s still reinventing itself for the PC. Tetris Friends is a free, online collection of popular Tetris game types (Marathon, Sprint, Ultra, Tetris 1989, Survival and n-blox, along with sponsored promo versions, currently plugging Ice Age 3). There’s also multiplayer modes, with two and six-player Battle mode, and five-player Sprint game. A few videos have appeared pushing the multiplayer games, which are below.

It works pretty damned well, too. Registering doesn’t require tedious emailing back and forth – just dump details into the form and you’re straight in. And then you can fire up a single or multiplayer game instantly. I played (and won, because I’m so great) a five-player Sprint, and a six-player Battle game, with a waiting time of approximately one second. The music is horrendous beyond belief, as you’ll hear in the trailers, but it can be switched off once you’re in a game. There’s also some sort of currency system, where you can buy meaningless baubles with your tokens, which I’m sure is lovely.

The plan is for the site to both incorporate the casual gamer, with accompanying leaderboards, profiles and all the usual gubbins, and to provide a place for high-end tournaments, with professional players (I know) competing. To get a taste, have a look at the videos (and wonder in horror at who decided leaving the tutorial screens in was a good idea):

Two-player Battle

Six-player Battle

Five-player Sprint

And yes, sure, I KNOW that “Block Party” is the most over-used headline ever, but look, right, see. People use it STUPIDLY. But this is a multiplayer Tetris game! THIS IS WHEN IT WAS FOR!

The most interesting part about the multiplayer is that you aren’t actually playing against real people. Well, not live anyway. They’re recordings of people’s best games, which is why they don’t quite respond as a real person, and also why the game loads so darn fast.

All this instant-dropping and ghost images of where your block will land are killing Tetris, dag nabbit!

As a Tetris veteran, I demand a return to the days when you had to double-time it all the way down the board if you wanted to get to the bottom sometime this week, and where knowing where your block would land ahead of time was a privilege of experience and not a bleedin’ crutch for babies who fail at figuring out how to fit Legos together!

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

PS: There actually is an authentic, monochrome Gameboy version!
Not quite authentic, actually. Apart from purely esthetic issue (the blocks and the music are not totally accurate), there are totally unauthentic gameplay differences: first, the playfield is 18×10 blocks where Tetris Gameboy is 19×10, then the rotations (that is, the way the tetraminos rotate) are more SRS-ish (= like Tetris DS or the other modes of Tetris friends or nearly any other Tetris in the 2000’s) and finally, there is lock delay (you can move a tetramino after it has landed).

to provide a place for high-end tournaments, with professional players (I know) competing

I doubt. How can you even think about a tournament when you don’t have any means to do a 1 on 1 match ?

Anyway, I’d recommend Blockbox instead of Tetris Friends. It is an indie (read: not approved by The Tetris Company – the creator asked them the permission to publish that game, but they never answered…) Tetris game, featuring an equally silly name, gameplay elements from both the official Tetris and the Tetris the Grand Master series (an hardcore and not less addictive variant of Tetris – I’m sure you have seen that youtube video of invisible Tetris) for both mono and multiplayer, and less sucky matchmaking system.